Deportation of the Crimean Tatars
The deportation of the Crimean Tatars or the Sürgünlik ('exile') was the ethnic cleansing and the cultural genocide of at least 191,044 Crimean Tatars which was carried out by the Soviet authorities from 18 to 20 May 1944, supervised by Lavrentiy Beria, chief of Soviet state security and the secret police, and ordered by the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. Within those three days, the NKVD used cattle trains to deport the Crimean Tatars, mostly women, children, and the elderly, even Communist Party members and Red Army members, to the Uzbek SSR, several thousand kilometres away. They constituted one of the several ethnicities which were subjected to Stalin's policy of population transfer in the Soviet Union.
Corpses of victims of the winter 1918 Red Terror in Evpatoria, Crimea
A Crimean Tatar family in the 1960s during deportation after Soviet authorities refused to permit them to live in Crimea. Even after the "special-settlers" regime was lifted, Crimean Tatars were not allowed to live in Crimea without a residence permit
An empty Tatar home in Crimea, photographed in 1968
Amet-khan Sultan was a highly decorated Crimean Tatar flying ace who was twice awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union. Amet-khan was one of the first people in the Soviet Union to publicly request the rehabilitation and right of return for the Crimean Tatars in 1956.
Crimean Tatar, also called Crimean, is a moribund Kipchak Turkic language spoken in Crimea and the Crimean Tatar diasporas of Uzbekistan, Turkey, Romania, and Bulgaria, as well as small communities in the United States and Canada. It should not be confused with Tatar, spoken in Tatarstan and adjacent regions in Russia; the two languages are related, but belong to different subgroups of the Kipchak languages, while maintaining a significant degree of mutual intelligibility. Crimean Tatar has been extensively influenced by nearby Oghuz dialects and is also mutually intelligible with them to varying degrees.
"Welcome to Crimea" (Qırımğa hoş keldiñiz!) written in Crimean Tatar Cyrillic, airport bus, Simferopol International Airport
Crimean Tatar Latin script on a plate in Bakhchysarai in 2009, along with Ukrainian
Crimean Tatar Latin script sign in Saky Raion in 2021, along with Russian and Ukrainian
An example of Crimean Tatar Arabic script